Pale Rider said:
Right wing SOCIALISM??!! Right wing FASCISM???!!! Excuse me but, you're fucking crazy.
First off, "socialism" is a classic trait of the LEFT! You know, take as a perfect example, hitlery clinton and her number one liberal LEFT story, "It Takes a ~VILLAGE~"! A story that purports a "village" is needed to raise a child, not a "mother and father". That baronbigfeat is SOCIALISM at it's core, and it comes from the LEFT, NOT the right. The left also believes in over taxing the rich to give to the poor, and that is "socialism" in it's purest form.
And FASCISM? It is the LEFT sir, that DEFENDS murdering, tyrannical dictators, NOT the right. The right fights fascism head on. The left coddles fascist, placates and makes excuses for fascist, and thinks fascist are better off left alone to continue their murdering, dictorial ways.
I would have expected you'd know these things, however you didn't, but now you do.
You're dismissed.
It used to be that "socialism" (both communism and fascism, before they were dirty words) were considered "left". Then there was the old "right", which was not only against New Deal shenanigans and soft-commie programs, but also against the mindless foreign interventionism of Woodrow Wilson and FDR. It was the right that recognized that the greatest losses of freedom (and increases in taxes) occur during wartime.
But the modern right DOES support oppressive dictators, as long as they toe the US line. Or at least, right-wing politicians do (as does the left). See: Libya, Pakistan, Egypt, and other regimes we've propped up. A short history of our interventionism in the mideast alone can be found
here.
Interventionism by big, muscular government at home and abroad is the key trait of all brands of socialism. In their minds, there is no problem that government cannot fix. The left and right have both supported foreign interventionism, although for slightly different reasons. Likewise, the left and right both want plenty of intervention in society and the economy, again for somewhat different reasons. Neither is a friend of laissez-faire.
Doug said:
Baron: Thanks for the links. I get Lew Rockwell's newsletter.
Our aim is not to re-invent the wheel, so we'll be linking to many different sites, certainly to these.
But note that lots of useful anti-collectivist stuff is scattered all over the web in literally hundreds of sites. We need somewhere where people who are trying to find out the right-of-center views on an issue, or who just want to investigate the anti-collectivist thinkers, can start their search, a place where the indexing has already been done, and where they can get a bit of background on the various tendencies and personalities on the Right written as neutrally as possible. A kind of Encyclopedia of Anti-Collectivism.
Consider taking part. It should be a useful enterprise, and fun too.
Doug
Hmm, okay. Well, here's my suggestion for what it's worth.
There's a lot of bad, cliched arguments that we've all heard before, over and over again, in various internet forums. So what you might do is have an index of commonly quoted arguments, linked to simple easy to understand replies. So the listing might look like this:
"FDR got us out of the depression"
"WWII got us out of the depression"
"We entered WWI because those damn Krauts torpedoed an unarmed boat."
"Runaway capitalism caused the great depression"
"Suburban sprawl is a sign of the free market run amok"
"The Federal Reserve is a vital tool in taming the ups and downs of the business cycle"
And so you have a huge page full of myths, and each statement is a clickable link. Ideally, you'd have arguments and sources from people who can't be attacked as being non-collectivist. For example, you might have:
*
James Kunstler, "
not exactly a conservative", discussing in great detail how federal interventionism, subsidies, meddling, regulations, and zoning created the modern american shithole sprawl-topia. Liberals can't really argue against a guy who shares their same motivations.
*Quotes from the founding fathers, or scans from [ame=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400082366/qid=1134280212/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-1734287-3728867?s=books&v=glance&n=283155]Jim Powell's[/ame] books, or [ame=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895260476/ref=pd_bxgy_text_b/002-1734287-3728867?%5Fencoding=UTF8]Thomas Wood's[/ame] books, demonstrating the folly of interventionism, and the federal government's fraudulent entry into so many different wars. These are good of course because you can't write them off as commie pinko libs.
And I think the best thing, if possible, would be actual scanned periodicals that demonstrate the point. For example, the Kaiser's government knew the Lusitania was loaded to the gills with ammunition, and tried to run ads in all the major american papers, warning people not to get on board. People can hardly belive that's true, but when you provide a scanned periodical where the ad appears, it gives great weight to your argument. People have a tough time believing that the civil war wasn't some high-minded crusade against slavery, but the actual newspaper editorials of the era show otherwise. As soon as I get my scanner working again, I'll scan the reverse side of this
Harper's Weekly, which has an editorial emphatically stating that this conflict was not started to set the slaves free:
That's how I'd do it, anyway.
